Power creates a conflict with truth and reason. Why? Because truth takes power out of your hands and puts it in the universe. Truth is universalized power. Universalizing power is taking power out of the hands of individuals.
A person is mongering power when he hates truth, because truth is the most direct threat to personal power. This shows that mongering power is sin. Truth ends sin and defines life. Truth is not a threat to life; it's only a threat to sin. To find truth threatening is to live by sin.
Otherwise truth would be the water which sustains life. Truth is not threatening to moral persons. It frees them from sin. Christ said, "truth will set you free" (John 8:32, 34). It frees people from sin. But power mongers don't want to be freed from sin, because sin is how power is mongered.
What's It Is
Power mongering is the basis of all sin, the cause of all problems and the destruction of life, in the spirit world and the material world. The reason is because power is the positive reinforcement for the stimulus-response reactions of sin.
Power is a drug, just like heroin. Power is god, just like LSD. Corrupt persons have no other criteria for God but power. That which promotes their power is supposedly God's work. Satan carried that ethic farther than anyone. As a result, satan is the source of power theology and the god of power mongers. Murder, lying and self-destruction are the consequences.
All reactive sin stems from subconscious forces which create stimulus-response reactions based on domination and expressed through all related attitudes including jealousy, bigotry, elitism, selfishness, etc.
It starts with the stupid assumption that if oneself could prevail against other persons and control them, it would solve his problems. But prevailing against and controlling someone prevents them from functioning and results in problems. It's like two persons wearing the same clothes. So there is always a resistance to that result. The resistance only increases the determination of the controller, and it results in destructive means of accomplishing the result. The resistive person needs to be subdued, and degradation is how it is done. Therefore, domination is inseparable from degradation.
Making it all work as slick as a pealed onion is power. But acquiring power is not easy. Since power is so desirable to corrupt persons and so difficult to acquire, acquiring it is a success which causes it to function as a positive reinforcement for the corruption.
All of this occurs in a mental state of mindlessness. Persons who have higher awareness realize the futility and destructivity and avoid the trappings. The persons who don't know what they are doing use rationalizations for their behavior trying to justify it. They convince themselves only; and they learn to believe their own lies.
One of the consequences is that corrupt persons learn to sanctify their corruptions and portray them as noble and necessary. The most extreme development of this attitude is worship. The most extreme power mongers demand worship. The strangest thing is that they get it. Lesser power mongers worship the more successful ones as a method of promoting their values and a system of exploitation. Worship is a trademark of the cult of power mongering. The most corrupt humans are worshipped as gods when they are perceived as winners. A notable example is Einstein, the so-called man of the century, who didn't know the difference between velocity and acceleration and plagiarized everything he promoted. Power mongers need gods to worship, even if they have to use wooden idols.
Supposedly, worshipping God is a virtue. Yet Christ did nothing to promote worship. He said he came not to be served but to serve (Mat 20:25-28)(Mark 10:42-45). Worshipping is always going to be a method of promoting values, even in the moral world; but moral persons do not allow it to corrupt the process of sustaining life through objective reality.
Corrupters of course do the opposite. They replace the objective realities of life with worship of their gods as a method of mongering power. The gods of perversion are called "charismatic leaders," because they can lead gullible persons to their own death, as occurred in cults such as Heaven's Gate, Jonestown or the Branch Dividians. A charismatic leader is someone who can portray himself as a winner. Making sin pay is the primary test of a winner. This is why lies carry farther than truth in a large part of public discourse. A liar is a winner, and a truth seeker is a loser, in the view of power mongers. Ridicule is placed above evidence, because the ability to ridicule is to be a winner.
Truth is the only force corrupters cannot defeat. For this reason, a war against truth becomes generalized for corrupt persons. They learn to hate all types of truth. Corruptions such as relativity and prions are promoted in science as a means of combating values related to truth.
Truth creates a barrier which limits how far corruption can go. If corrupters cross that barrier, they expose themselves as destroyers, and everyone feels threatened by them. So they have to perpetrate their corruptions behind a facade of the opposite. They learn to speak in opposites as a method of deflecting criticism. They claim to be solving problems, while their only purpose is to create them.